On higher education, literature, and the virtues of uppity negritude

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Monthly Archives: April 2015

Be on the lookout for “Percival Everett by Percival Everett,” my latest essay forthcoming in The New Inquiry.

Reading through Conversations with Percival Everett in the process of writing that piece. I discovered this outstanding primary and secondary online bibliography on Percival Everett compiled by Joe Weixlmann and hosted by African-American Review, LINK. (And, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the secondary bibliography lists my dissertation chapter on Erasure.)

Below is an abstract for my upcoming talk at the NeMLA conference in Toronto on the panel “College in Crisis: Higher Education in Literature and Popular Culture.” I’m particularly excited about this panel because it’s a rare opportunity for some face-to-face dialogue with other scholars of academic fiction.

“Academia and the Riddle of Race in Percival Everett’s Academic Fiction”

Though his work is often filed under the genre of “literary fiction” Percival Everett’s writing has bounded across an array of literary genres and themes. His first novel, Suder (1983) is the story of a black professional baseball player who is experiencing a batting slump and becomes obsessed with the music of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Among his other novels are Frenzy (1997) a retelling of the Dionysus myth set in ancient Greece, and God’s Country (1994) an American Western set in the 1870s. In this presentation I will examine Percival Everett’s work in academic fiction, a genre defined by its fictional depictions of universities, students and professors. In his 2001 satirical novel Erasure Percival Everett examines the significance of racial authenticity in black literary and cultural production, and explores broader questions about authenticity, art and cultural politics, while delivering a scathing satire of literary academia’s pretentious excesses. Everett’s novel Glyph, published in 1999 (and recently reissued by Graywolf Press in 2014) features a silent, highly intelligent baby named Ralph who is conversant in literary theory and carries on an interior monologue of insults directed at his parents. Everett’s 2009 novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier includes scenes set at the historically black Morehouse College, featuring a professor named “Percival Everett” who teaches a class on “Nonsense,” and is critical of the college’s respectability politics. In all of these novels Everett engages, undercuts, ridicules and critiques academic discourses and racial logics. This presentation is part of a book project on academic novels and the politics of the black intellectual, and in this paper I will examine the ways in which Everett’s academic fictions generate provocative conversations about the role of black intellectuals in higher education, and the vexing history of race in American culture and literature.

This was my first time in Asheville and it was as picturesque as advertised. I presented on Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and, appropriately enough, the title of my panel was “Navigating Normativity: Southern Style.” After an informal poll at the beginning of my talk I was a bit surprised to find that none of the people in the room (save for one CUNY Grad Center colleague) had heard of Delany at all! Hopefully I provided a good introduction and created a few new Delany readers.

Overall the conference presenters were much younger than I expected, as my CUNY friend also observed. There were more first year graduate students and even undergraduate papers than I expected. But that was also an opportunity to get a look at the future of the field. It was encouraging to see a panel full of brave young women from a state school in SOUTH CAROLINA presenting papers on feminism, sexuality and pop culture. They reminded me of myself as an undergraduate when I got my first exposure to professional academic life by presenting at African-American history conferences.

Next up was the first LGBTQ Scholars of Color Conference organized by CLAGS and hosted at John Jay College. The main thing I noticed about this conference is that it was overwhelmingly dominated by social sciences and public health. That’s a good thing. CLAGS was founded by historian Martin Duberman, and housed at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has been well-represented with queer theorists in literary and culture studies. During my time at CLAGS I worked under the leadership of a political scientist who worked to add more social science programming. There was much talk at this conference about navigating the sometimes treacherous world of funding and foundations. This is important stuff because I know this kind of quantitative work influences public policy in a way that the humanities, as important as they are, cannot. There’s a Storify of the #LGBTSOC tweets from the conference here: LINK

What was lacking in the humanities at the CLAGS conference I more than made up for at University of Maryland DC Queer Studies Conference. I presented at this conference in 2012 which was a 70th birthday celebration of Samuel R. Delany and his magnificent writing. After a day of stimulating talks at this year’s conference I was glad that I decided to return. I presented again on Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which Delany had just published before the 2012 conference, and from which he gave a reading that evening. This was another conference with a lot of digital engagement and Alexis Lothian put together this Storify of #DCQS15 tweets which gives a better overview of the talks than I can give here.

I’ve wanted to work on Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders to build out from my 2013 review of the novel in the GC Advocate. There’s so much that I didn’t get to in that review (the book is 804 pages long) and several things that I wanted to correct. I also wanted to write about the digital reception of the novel in online magazines and blog reviews, including responses from Delany himself. It’s a longer range project that is probably more of a tangent from my main research than I should be taking on right now, but it’s something I’ve been bugging myself to follow up on and get finished. However, it IS related to the book since there are similarities to Delany’s academic novel The Mad Man, about which I’m writing a chapter.

And so, the month of queer conferencing is done, and I’m moving on to the next phase of research, which is more directly related to the book. At the Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Toronto I’ll be presenting on Percival Everett’s academic fiction, and participating in a “Creative Criticism” session where I’ll be presenting an autobiographical section of the book, talking about my own “blackademic life” in relation to these works of black academic fiction that I’m writing about.